The Pillowman – Lyric Theatre – Review
by Cathy Brown

The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh
A Lyric Theatre and Prime Cut Co-Production
Until June 15th, 2024

Following on from their impressive production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane last year, Prime Cut and the Lyric, Belfast have teamed up again to present another play by Martin McDonagh. Even those familiar with McDonagh’s offhand way with murder and his penchant for dark humour may need to brace themselves for the shock of The Pillowman.

Just over twenty years on from its first staging, the play still has the power to appal and provoke and under Jordan’s assured and forensic care, feels as fresh today as when it first opened. The Pillowman centres on the jocularly named Katurian Katurian, a prolific writer of Shockheaded-Peter-style fables which tend to feature small children meeting gruesome deaths. A man whose past is grim and whose immediate future looks grimmer, Katurian has been brought in for interrogation by the police of the totalitarian regime under which he lives. According to Tupolski and Ariel, his two interrogators, someone is using Katurian’s unpublished stories as a blueprint for a series of macabre copycat child murders.

However, The Pillowman is less about whether violent words can incite violent deeds, or even the threat that powerful literature poses to an authoritarian state and is more a warped celebration of the inherent and essential human instinct to create stories, tease with half-truths and reinvent the very stuff of our lives.

Every character in The Pillowman is a storyteller of some kind. Topolski’s sardonic questioning is a slippery game of truth versus lies and who relishes playing with words and language. Ariel, the thug who is there to administer torture, harbours a maudlin fantasy of how his life might play out in old age. Katurian has channelled a truly awful childhood – where he murdered his parents to save his brother Michael – into gruesome fairytales (which are vividly brought to life on stage in a series of strikingly imaginative vignettes) but despite that sacrifice, still values his stories more than the lives of his brother or even himself.

This theme is expertly played out on Ciaran Bagnell’s stark, surreal set, under the carefully sustained direction of Emma Jordan. Each cast member acts out the different degrees of their relationship with the truth as they cajole, manipulate and comfort for their own ends. The always-impressive Abigail McGibbon is a tour-de-force as Topolski, mining her role for the necessary moments of black humour without sacrificing an undercurrent of palpable menace. As Ariel, Steven Calvert charts the shift from intimidating heavy to questioning supporter well, giving his character enough layers to make him oddly likeable. Between them, their Pinteresque banter constantly swings between pedantry, bursts of violence and sheer absurdity and the shifts in tone are navigated with ease. David Murphy as Michael is equal parts amusing and heartfelt, masking the horror of the real person who lies beneath the childish exterior.

Keith Singleton has the toughest task – required to create a character who is both demented and likeable, and to narrate Katurian’s stories as they are played out on stage. He portrays both aspects beautifully, making Katurian both sympathetic and scary while delivering his grisly stories with mesmerising aplomb. Those stories are wonderfully re-enacted by Jude Quinn and Rosie McClelland, supported by the young talents of Erin Barry and Amelia Skillen and are stylishly choreographed with an impressive atmosphere and physical intensity.

That intensity infuses the whole production which grips from the outset and doesn’t let up until the final disquieting moments. Piercingly funny, unsettling and deeply thought-provoking, Emma Jordan’s production is bold and uncompromising, managing to entertain even as it interrogates the very artistic medium within which it is presented. ‘Art is not meant to be safe. It’s meant to disturb, to provoke, to challenge” says Katurian and that is exactly what this production does, providing a theatrical jolt that is as shocking as it is thrilling.